Monday, November 19, 2007

Enjoy The Warm Weather, Blame China, Wait For The Mass Die Off

Here's an inconvenient truth, one that seems to be largely ignored or downplayed, perhaps due to political correctness - an estimated five to 10 per cent of human beings who ever lived in all of history are alive right now. Global population has more than quadrupled in the 108 years since 1900 from 1.5 billion then to 6.6 billion-plus in 2007, and is projected to be nine billion by 2050, with more than three billion in India and China alone - greater than the entire world population in 1950. There are now substantially more than twice the number of people sharing the planet and its resources than there were when I was born 56 years ago, all breathing and eating and excreting and burning and generally making pigs of ourselves in ways small and large.In short, we have outstripped the planet's carrying and absorbing capacity, and aside from a catastrophic population die-off (which can't be ruled out due to flu mutations and other superbugs, or famine due to global crop failures), there's not much that can be done about global warming and other environmental nemeses that could hit the tipping point at any moment. Might as well enjoy the unseasonably nice weather while we can.Of course, while our generation gets the nice weather, the next one down the road gets the ridiculously extreme weather and Charles, at 56 years old, probably clocks out just in time to miss it. Not that Mr. Moore doesn't worry about the children, because while maybe we can't prevent future generations from dying in their millions, we can make sure they grow up with a totally negative attitude towards witches:

Sorcery is specifically referenced in the Bible as a violation of divine law (eg: Deuteronomy 18:10-12; Galatians 5:20). The Potter books make no such judgment. Evil is identified in relative rather than absolute terms, with witchcraft touted as a force for promoting good - radically contradicting Christian belief.[...]...from a Christian perspective, children immersing themselves in Harry Potter are being desensitized to the dangers of spiritual practices explicitly condemned and forbidden by Holy Scripture.While our theoretical Canadian of tomorrow is eating their belt to avoid starvation, and hacking up a lung due to some new super disease, they can at least take comfort in the fact that, thanks to the efforts of Mr. Moore and the like minded, they were never able to get their hands on a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone.

At least we can all rest assured that communists, environmental do-gooders, and U.N.-supported Third World Dicatators have all done more than their share to keep the population in control. Without them, there would likely be another 500 million people alive on the planet today.

I find the coffee helps when dealing with the far-right crap. I'd rather be irritated by the abysmal stupidity than depressed by it. As for ulcers...thank God ranitidine is available over the counter, now.

It's pretty clear to me, joseph (Stalin?). Communist purges, planned starvations and internal mass murders accounted for over 50 million deaths in the 20th century. Environmentalists who fought to ban DDT sealed the fate of approximately 30 million people in Africa who died of malaria. And the UN, a group mainly composed of Third World dictators, always seems to be just ineffective enough so that nothing happens when the local dictator goes on a killing spree.

If you can blame the West for killing the planet, then you can thank the above three groups for trying to 'save' it from overpopulation.

As for your malaria figures, that bunch of malarkey always gets tossed about, usually followed by laying all the illnesses of the world at Rachel Carson's feet. Because, let's face it, an aging single woman author in Maryland dying of cancer is surely to blame for any pandemic illness that should ever sweep the globe.

The fact that she pointed out in a poignant novel that rational testing of chemical use and insecticides was needed, and the fact that the novel helped awaken a generation to the dangers of overusing untested chemicals in the environment who in turn demanded tighter standards from their elected officals is hardly a smoking gun tying to the direct deaths of Africans from malaria. Civil unrest, poverty and extreme social inequality, drought and crop failures clearly played a larger and more direct role. Oh, and the fact that chemical spraying did continue in Africa in attempts to control malaria and the fact that subsequent genrations of mosquitos become resilient to DDT would seem to take the edge off the "blame the treehuggers" for death mentality you aspouse.

And with regard to Stalin - no, not my last name, sorry to disappoint. And, yeah, bad guy . . . did horrible things, responsible for many tragic deaths, an evil tyarnt. You brought him up - not me. So what does he have to do with protecting the environment we inherit when we are born to this earth? Umm, how about NOTHING.

Do I think we should take action on global warming? Yes.

So your final point seems to be that you are disappointed with the UN for not doing enough to protect the planet. That's fair enough. So how's this for an idea, why don't we instead hold our leaders a bit more accountable then? (especially since the normal refrain is typically something like "we don't want no stinking foreignors telling us what we can do")

Is that really what your arguing now - an actual effort by the current government to address climate change, rather than staging another photo op and signing another "aspirational document" about something we might addresse at some point in the future.

Because if so, I have to agree with you, my bumbling nearly incoherent anonymous pal.

It's not that the dissenters don't have a right to dissent, or in some cases, don't in fact have a point; it's just that they argue their case so damn badly...long-debunked myths about restrictions on DDT causing the malaria pandemic, insane comparisons between dictators and environmentalists, facile arguments about science being just another faith, witless diatribes that are nothing other than projections of one's own ignorance and mean-spiritedness...

We have bred a generation of nasty idiots (who don't seem to know the value of not talking), I'm convinced of it, and that, if nothing else, makes the case that the West isn't nearly all it's cracked up to be.

If they want the West to survive, I wish they'd stop being perfect examples of its appalling decline.